John Calvin

Marilynne Robinson points out in her introduction to The Death of Adam that John Calvin is regularly condemned, harangued and set forth as ‘religion gone wrong’ in many a university classrom, and yet it is simultaneously the unwritten assumption that it is highly suspect to actually read his writing. He is often labeled as tyrannical, seeking to build some narrow minded theocratic empire in Geneva. He is accused of sectarianism and has been made the poster boy of Salem-Witch-Trial-Puritanism, burning the heretic Servetus at the stake an all that. But Robinson makes several helpful points particularly on the bit about Servetus: “One man is one man too many, of course, but the standards of the time, and considering Calvin’s embattled situation, the fact that he has only Servetus to answer for is evidence of astonishing restraint… Geneva in the time of Calvin had in fact reformed its laws so that religious infractions could not receive a penalty harsher than banishment. Servetus came there perhaps for this reason, having escaped imprisonment by the Inquisition in Vienna… Then the Genevans brok their own law by trying and burning him. Disheartening as that fact is, it nevertheless indicates that Calvinist Geneva was eschewing a practice which was, and for centuries had been, commonplace all over Europe–as Geneva was well aware since their coreligionists elsewhere were chief among those being burned.”